A humble history
Humble Bundle’s subscription service “Humble Monthly”, initially launched in October 2015, featured a curated set of games at the start of each month. Five percent (5%) of the fees go to charity and every month, there would have also been different charities featured.
One of the hits and misses of the Humble Monthly was that it would have featured several headliner games, while the rest of the games would only be revealed at a certain point in time, basically like a mystery box. Regardless, as a subscriber, you would have the option to pause the subscription and skip a month whenever you don’t like the games in the headlines.
In December 2019, the Humble Bundle’s subscription service transitioned from Humble Monthly to Humble Choice. While some of the features like Humble Trove and store discounts remained the same, Humble Choice offered at least 10 games a month and depending on which subscription tier you paid for, you can get to keep its equivalent number of games. Also, unlike its predecessor, Humble Choice already reveals its games at the start of the month, for its subscribers to choose from.
In January 2022, Humble Bundle made another change to Humble Choice, keeping the subscription plan to a single price and making all games available to all subscribers, but with the promise of curating a high quality of game line-ups.
Humble Choice No Choice
I personally think that the changes made from Monthly to Choice were understandable, but the changes made from Choice to the “new” Choice? Not so much.
The 2019 Choice offered different subscription plans wherein you get a fixed number of games in the pool of choices depending on your subscription plan: 3 games for the Basic tier, 9 games for the Premium tier, and as for existing Monthly subscribers who were automatically transitioned to the Classic tier, would get 10+ games. The Classic tier was a great perk for the existing Monthly subscribers, but it also left a poor taste in newer subscribers whilst giving them no choice of getting the same perks as the existing ones.
The 2022 Choice got rid of the subscription plans entirely. So basically, the only choice you now get is whether you skip the month’s bundle or not, and by skipping, you would tend to lose the store discounts you would have slowly earned over a couple of months’ worth.
The different subscription plans would have played out really well if Humble Bundle offered a way for new subscribers to get the same (or at least close to the same) perks as those of the Classic subscribers. A really neat perk for any kind of subscriber would have been to hold off on one or two of your choices for the month to use up for next month or so. Say there’s only a few games you like for the month, so instead of skipping, you get to claim these games and use up 1-2 remaining choices for next month’s choices. This would have especially worked well if there had been more choices, even for the Classic and Premium tiers. Technically, there really just wasn’t much of any “choice” back then even for the Classic subscribers like me.
In closing, I think a Build-Your-Own-Bundle subscription model for a new Humble Choice would work out really well given we all have different tastes in games.